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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday November 11 2015, @09:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the your-code-looks-like-swiss-cheese dept.

The Washington Post published an article today which describes the ongoing tension between the security community and Linux kernel developers. This has been roundly denounced as FUD, with Rob Graham going so far as to claim that nobody ever attacks the kernel.

Unfortunately he's entirely and demonstrably wrong, it's not FUD and the state of security in the kernel is currently far short of where it should be.

[Here is] an example. Recent versions of Android use SELinux to confine applications. Even if you have full control over an application running on Android, the SELinux rules make it very difficult to do anything especially user-hostile. Hacking Team, the GPL-violating Italian company who sells surveillance software to human rights abusers, found that this impeded their ability to drop their spyware onto targets' devices. So they took advantage of the fact that many Android devices shipped a kernel with a flawed copy_from_user() implementation that allowed them to copy arbitrary userspace data over arbitrary kernel code, thus allowing them to disable SELinux.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by MostCynical on Thursday November 12 2015, @09:46AM

    by MostCynical (2589) on Thursday November 12 2015, @09:46AM (#262084) Journal

    I would like to congratulate frojack for being employed in an apparently ideal world.
    Only slightly jealous.
    Most projects I have worked on have only as much security as the contract or legislation required, and often only "in spirit" ("look 'xyz certification', we have that! (for one box, that we don't let anyone connect to the interwebs)")

    --
    "I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
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